I'm French, and I'm baffled. How can this kind of comment make it to Insightful ? In case you're not aware, the French have no cyclists to be proud of. None. Why we would kill an American's career to facilitate the win of a Spanish, Netherlander, another American, a British, another Netherlander, a German, an Italian... shall I go on ?
Oh... right, because we're proud.

ErichTheWebGuy writes: A nuclear physicist working on the "large collider" experiment to simulate the Big Bang has been arrested in France on suspicion of advising al-Qa'ida on possible terrorist targets.

The 32-year-old French scientist, of Algerian origin, is being held with his younger brother after being trailed, and bugged, by French anti-terrorist police for more than a year.

A judicial source told the newspaper Le Figaro: "This is very high level." The French Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, said that the investigation "may perhaps show that we have prevented the worst".

The scientist, who was not immediately named, was arrested alongside his brother near Lyons on Thursday on suspicion of having contacts with al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb, or Aqim. He was said to have been suspected of giving advice on possible nuclear targets within France.

An anonymous reader writes: The rumors of a Playstation 3 being slashed from $399 to $299 is here and K-Mart let the cat out of the bag as it features an ad on its home page that reveals the price cuts as well as the announcement of a new Sony PS3 Slim edition, priced at only $299. You can go ahead and preorder the new PS3 Slim for $299 and it will be available on August 24th, 2009. Sony has a press event today, which I'm sure will announce the details of the new PS3 Slim as well as the price reduction. Perhaps there will be even more news to be had.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "With all the armchair lawyers and pundits out there, it's interesting to see that i4i believes that OpenOffice does not infringe upon their patent. As you may remember, i4i's patent is the one that lead to a permanent injunction barring Microsoft from selling, using, encouraging the use of, testing, marketing or supporting any copies of Microsoft Word which can open files containing custom XML, subject to a bit of leniency for supporting infringing copies already sold and with respect to removing the feature in future versions. Lest anyone think that the ODF will win over OOXML because of this, keep in mind that Microsoft has its own broad XML document patent, which issued just two weeks ago (and filed in December 2004), and they're telling the Supreme Court to apply the Bilski ruling narrowly, so that it doesn't invalidate patents like theirs (and i4i's). After all, Microsoft can afford $280 million infringement fines in ways that most companies and individuals cannot. Then again, given that Microsoft's new patent has only two independent claims (claim #1 and claim #12), and both of those claims 'comprise' something using an 'XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features', maybe they wouldn't be that hard to work around if you just make sure any otherwise infringing format is only associated with an application that doesn't have a rich set of features."Link to Original Source

mr_sifter writes: "There's a large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words for describing something you don't like — but only PC gamers use the word "port" with such a fervent degree of repulsion. Common complaints about console ports include meagre graphics options, dodgy third-person camera angles, poorly thought-out controls and sparsely distributed save points.
In this feature, bit-tech.net talks to developers of games such as Dead Space, Red Faction and Tales of Monkey Island to find out why porting games between the three current consoles and the PC is so difficult. Radically different CPU, graphics and memory architectures play their part, as do the differences in control methods and the rules the Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo set about how games should work on their systems."Link to Original Source

Hugh Pickens writes: "New research shows that Wikipedia's ascendancy to the top of a large pool of online reference sites has come to an end as growth has leveled and the nature of the community has made it less welcoming to new contributors. "It's easy to say that Wikipedia will always be here," says Dr. Ed Chi, a senior scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. "This research shows that is not a given." While the site is still wildly popular for those trying to figure out who played in Super Bowl XXII, the name of Pink Floyd's original frontman, or how a convection oven works, the explosive growth that characterized its early years leveled in 2006 at around 60,000 new articles per month, declining by nearly a third since then. But the trends within the community itself are far more troublesome. The year after the amount of new content flattened, the number of edits per month plateaued as well at around 5.5 million. Meanwhile, the number of users making edits leveled off at around 750,000 monthly. Data also suggests the Wikipedia community is becoming resistant to new content and new editors with passive editors who make just a single change per month seeing around a quarter of their changes erased or modified by other, more active editors. "This is evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content," says Chi. The resulting exclusion of more varied contributions shifts the balance of power on Wikipedia to those fewer active editors, and in turn could make Wikipedia more like a fraternity than a community-driven social encyclopedia. Wikipedia's growth "is consistent with a growth processes that hits a constraint — for instance, due to resource limitations in systems," writes Chi. "Rather than exponential growth, such systems display logistic growth.""

An anonymous reader writes: Subscribers of the second largest ISP in France can now enable IPv6 without extra cost. Deploying IPv6 service took Free just 5 weeks, from getting an IPv6 prefix to offering the option to all of Free's 1.5 million customers. A modified 6to4 protocol called 6rd, short for IPv6 rapid deployment, enables reliable tunnels through IPv4-only access networks without the problems which users of 6to4 tunnels can encounter when communicating with native IPv6 hosts. Alexandre Cassens of Free presented this major step at the Ripe 58 meeting in Amsterdam and reportedly received standing ovations from Google's IPv6 expert Lorenzo Colitti.Link to Original Source

Funny, during my H1b days, I always thought I was paid at least as much as my colleagues. I went through my company closing, and had support of everybody around me. I worked for 3 different companies in 5 years (a couple of big ones), and never once was felt pressured as an H1B.
What do I know, maybe I am the exception?

Having been in this situation a while back, no, there is officially no grace period. As far as I know, it just happens that the administration lets people transfer anyways. I have heard 10 days, 2 months, nothing... I personally had my H1b transfer initiated in the couple of days after my company closed. Technically, you can apply for transfer, start at your new job, and have your transfer denied (or so they say, I never actually heard about a denied transfer). fun stuff!

Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Thursday October 16, 2008 @10:03AM
from the i-woulda-guessed-less dept.

Death Metal writes "Browser maker Opera has published the early results of an ongoing study that aims to provide insight into the structure of Internet content. To conduct this research project, Opera created the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool that crawls the web and indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million pages."